On the menu today: I picked a quiet week to be away, huh? The FBI executed a search warrant on President Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, a stabbing attack by an Islamist extremist seriously injured Salman Rushdie, Joe Biden absurdly claimed that inflation had reached zero percent overnight, and New York Jets quarterback Zach Wilson is having knee surgery. Apparently, Greg and I can never go on vacation during the same week again.
Whom Is the Law For?
The grassroots of both the Democrats and the Republicans believe that the opposition party’s leaders get away with murder and that their own leaders get the book thrown at them just for jaywalking.
For the past six years or so, many Democrats scoffed, “But her emails!” — implicitly arguing that whatever Hillary Clinton did regarding her emails, including classified information, back when she was Secretary of State, was unimportant in the context of the 2016 presidential election. And make no mistake, the FBI determined that emails on Clinton’s private server contained classified information. In his infamous July 5, 2016, statement, then-FBI director James Comey revealed that, “110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification.”
To most Trump supporters, the classified information in Hillary’s emails was just one of the most vivid examples of her arrogance and sense that the rules and laws didn’t apply to her. To Hillary’s fanbase, it was a routine paperwork snafu with no real-world consequences that was hyped up by her political enemies.
Fast forward a few years, and now almost everyone in the political-outrage-industrial complex has switched places. Now Donald Trump is accused of taking documents with classified or other sensitive information with him when he left the White House and storing them at Mar-a-Lago, defying a federal law which requires their return to the appropriate archives.
Back in 2016, Comey concluded that Hillary Clinton’s use of an insecure private system was mostly a big misunderstanding, not a deliberate effort to hide her communications from institutional archives or future FOIA requests:
We did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information. . . . There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.
Six years ago, despite the considerable evidence that the then-Democratic nominee for president had violated the law, Comey concluded it was not worth it for the FBI to recommend criminal charges to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” Comey said. “Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts . . . although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.”
When I heard about the FBI executing a search warrant in a hunt for unreturned documents with sensitive information, I thought of Comey’s assessment that criminal charges against Clinton just weren’t needed. I also thought about an observation from famous RussiaGate investigator and prosecutor John Durham:
You are only authorized to bring a prosecution if you believe, based upon the evidence that you have, that you are likely to be able to prove a case not to the probable-cause standard, which is all that is required to arrest somebody, but if you believe you can prosecute the case and prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt, and beyond that, that you would be able to sustain that conviction on appeal. And if you can’t say, in all honesty, that you would be able to do that, then prosecution is not warranted.
Someone within federal law enforcement thinks that what was found at Mar-a-Lago represents evidence of a crime that could well lead to an indictment and a conviction — and that the conviction will be sustained upon appeal. (Our Andy McCarthy theorized that the search actually had more to do with investigations relating to January 6: “The ostensible justification for the search of Trump’s compound is his potentially unlawful retention of government records and mishandling of classified information. The real reason is the Capitol riot.”)
Under the law, Donald Trump is just another citizen, no more or less special than anyone else. If the documents are legally required to be kept in secure government facilities, then they are legally required to be kept in secure government facilities, full stop. Whether they’re classified or declassified doesn’t matter. Even if Trump now says he declassified them, courts have previously ruled there has to be a legal record of the declassification — a verbal “standing order” doesn’t cut it. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in July 2020 that, “Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures. Executive order 13,526 established the detailed process through which secret information can be appropriately declassified. . . . Declassification, even by the president, must follow established procedures.”
But these are far from normal circumstances. Donald Trump is a furious former president who believes that a “deep state” conspired to rig an election and unjustly remove him from office. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have recognized that Trump would perceive the search as the federal government declaring a war against him personally and would respond with apoplectic fury. Whoever authorized this search warrant had better be darn sure that it was worth the likely consequences. A lot of Americans won’t easily grasp — or will choose not to grasp — why a former president keeping old papers, even ones containing sensitive information, in his heavily secured estate should be subjected to criminal charges.
After all, Comey and the FBI didn’t see any need for criminal charges against Hillary in similar circumstances. In fact, Comey’s contention that, “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” indicates that pressing charges for this sort of thing is wildly unreasonable, or even absurd. In Comey’s account, it wasn’t even a close call.
And the contrast with Hillary Clinton is not the only case where Trump supporters can point to federal law enforcement effectively ignoring what appears to be a slam-dunk case of criminal behavior by a high-profile Democratic figure. Hunter Biden more or less confessed to lying on his paperwork to purchase a firearm in 2018, declaring that he was not “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance.” While promoting his memoir in spring 2021, the younger Biden said that at the time he’d purchased the gun, he was an addict who smoked crack “literally every 15 minutes.”
Federal prosecutors are apparently still debating whether to press charges against the president’s son; at least one former federal prosecutor argues that the glacial pace of the federal investigation and lengthy deliberation is abnormal. “[I]t’s not adding up. It’s certainly not what I would have done. And it’s not what the majority of my colleagues who served as U.S. attorneys and assistant U.S. attorneys would have done in this case,” former U.S. attorney Brett Tolman told Fox News. “Anybody who wanted to seek justice in this case would have charged Hunter Biden very quickly. . . . I mean, this is so simple and so basic that the only conclusion I can make is political games are being played and have from the very beginning.”
The problem with arguing, “They didn’t enforce the law against Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden, but they did against Trump,” is that it amounts to an argument that the American justice system is only fair if leaders and elites of both parties get to ignore laws they find inconvenient. But we shouldn’t want any of our leaders ignoring any laws. If a law is worth having on the books, it is worth enforcing; if it is not worth enforcing, it is not worth having on the books.
If an official breaks the law, then prosecute them — even if they’re the all-but-certain Democratic nominee a few weeks away from the convention, or a former president that is a stone-cold lock to run for another term. But don’t contend that lawbreaking is okay if it is done by political leaders you prefer, or that your party is entitled to at least one free crime because the other party has gotten away with some. We need one clear and consistent standard, applied to leaders of both parties.
Americans’ Inability to Remember Math Lessons Helps President Biden
I see that while I was away, the Biden administration semi-successfully Jedi Mind Tricked people into believing any reduction in the month-to-month inflation rate amounts to the elimination of inflation: “Today we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July. Zero percent.”
Prices in June 2022 were 9.1 percent higher than in June 2021. Prices in July 2022 were 8.5 percent higher than in July 2021. While it is good to see that the rate of increase has stopped climbing, that does not mean that inflation — the price increases — stopped. Prices are still significantly higher than they were a year earlier; they’ve just stopped increasing at such a fast pace.
A reduction in the rate of increase is not the same as a reduction in the total amount. This is the same trick Biden uses when he boasts about how he’s reduced the deficit. The deficit is the difference between what the federal government spends and what it collects in taxes in a given fiscal year; the debt is the total amount the federal government owes to its creditors. The Covid-19 pandemic meant the U.S. government was spending a lot more than it normally does — trillions more. It’s no surprise that the government spent less in 2022 than it did in 2020 or 2021. The deficit may be going down, but the debt is still going up.
ADDENDA: Thanks to Isaac Schorr and Alexandra DeSanctis for filling in while I was away.
Last week was also your vacation from me nagging you to buy my books — unless you received my vacation autoreply.
The publication date for Gathering Five Storms is just a week away — I understand that Amazon may actually send copies out a few days early. If you want a $.99-cent sample to see if this thriller series is for you, Saving the Devil is available now and is already up to 4.5 stars on Amazon. It’s a wonderful bit of end-of-summer-vacation reading. Or you can just say, “Hey, Jim, I like what you do.”
From an early briefing scene, where the CIA’s Katina Leonidivna and Alec Flanagan bring Treasury enforcement agent Minnie Black up to speed:
“Minnie, your presence means Treasury has a seat at the table, and we think your office’s experience in following money can help us track down another Shedim Network member.”
She handed over another red folder. “He’s a globetrotter, one of the lesser aspiring oligarchs of Belarus, Vasil Volodko, nicknamed ‘Double V.’ Made his fortune when Lukashenko favored his wine and spirits bottling plant over a rival he deemed disloyal. Long story short, about a decade ago, Volodko lost a fortune on some Israeli real estate development–”
“Who tries to build a golf course in the path of incoming Hamas rockets?” Alec cracked. “The seventeenth green kept getting pelted with shrapnel, thanks to Iron Dome.”
Undeterred, Katrina continued. “Ever since then, Volodko’s publicly raged that ‘the Jews’ secretly control the world economy.”
Black perused the file and nodded. “You would think the space lasers would be enough.”